Two Sisters

John D. Graham, 1944 · Gallery 522 · Floor 5

Alright, so John Graham said his father was Jupiter. Ya know. The god. Which makes the rest of his story sound fairly reasonable. So... he gets to New York in 1920. Back home, his name was Ivan Dombrowski. And the guy's got stories. An aristocratic family, a stint in the Tsar's cavalry. Then the revolution, prison, and an escape through Crimea. Some of that checks out. The bit about sharing a cell with the Tsar is... harder to follow. Even his birthplace is a problem. Usually it's Kyiv. But the baptism papers say Warsaw. Anyway. He learns to paint. He's already in his thirties. Then he writes a book about art. By 1942, a decorating firm asks him to put a show together. He hangs Picasso, Matisse and Braque alongside some local painters who haven't made much of a name for themselves. De Kooning. Lee Krasner. Jackson Pollock. Krasner hasn't even heard of Pollock. Goes over to his place to find out who this guy is. And two years later, Graham paints this. Two Sisters. Pearls. Jewels. Velvet. Like they've dressed for a Renaissance portrait, except nobody's quite got their top on. One's holding a pigeon. Look at that sleeve between them. Loose blue and yellow strokes, right next to all that flat pink skin. Then the hands. Parts are just pencil. Same with the belly and the ledge. Now the eyes. Both women. Cross-eyed. Graham said that helped hold the figures in place. Gave the painting more tension. More than Raphael's paintings, apparently. But then, he said, he lived in a more tense age. An acquaintance got a different explanation. That's what women's eyes did during an orgasm. According to Graham. Anyway, those younger painters start making their names. Graham goes the other way. Back to the old masters. Women like this. By 1946, he's writing The Case of Mr. Picasso. In his letters, he calls him a charlatan. Picasso. The guy he'd hung beside the Americans. Now he's a fraud. According to Graham. Some old friends are startled. They'd spent years listening to him. And Graham keeps going. Into alchemy. Astrology. Painting women with symbols drawn across their faces. Toward the end of his life, he says the paintings carry information. Occult knowledge. Things only a few people will know how to read.

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